page_title: William Beckford (novelist)
section_title: Lansdown Crescent and Lansdown Tower (Beckford's Tower)
hierarchical_section_title: William Beckford (novelist) / Lansdown Crescent and Lansdown Tower (Beckford's Tower)
caption_attribution_description: English: William Beckford's tomb at Beckfords Tower
context_page_description: William Thomas Beckford was an English novelist; an art collector and patron of works of decorative art, a critic, travel writer, slaveowner, and sometime politician, reputed at one stage in his life to be the richest commoner in England. His parents were William Beckford and Maria Hamilton, daughter of the Hon. George Hamilton. He was Member of Parliament for Wells from 1784 to 1790, for Hindon from 1790 to 1795 and 1806 to 1820.
  He is remembered as the author of the Gothic novel Vathek, the builder of the remarkable lost Fonthill Abbey and Lansdown Tower, Bath, and especially for his art collection.
context_section_description: Beckford spent his later years in his home at Lansdown Crescent, Bath, during which time he commissioned architect Henry Goodridge to design a spectacular folly at the northern end of his land on Lansdown Hill: Lansdown Tower, now known as Beckford's Tower, in which he kept many of his treasures. The tower is now owned by the Bath Preservation Trust and managed by the Beckford Tower Trust as a museum to William Beckford; part of the property is rented to the Landmark Trust which makes it available for public hire as a spectacular holiday home.  The museum contains numerous engravings and chromolithographs of the Tower's original interior as well as furniture commissioned specifically for the Tower by Beckford and gradually reassembled through the efforts of the Bath Preservation Trust and others.  There is also a great deal of information at the Tower about Beckford, including objects related to his life in Bath, at Fonthill and elsewhere.
  After his death at Lansdown Crescent on 2 May 1844, aged 84, his body was laid in a sarcophagus and placed on an artificial mound, as was the custom of Saxon kings from whom he claimed to be descended. Beckford had wished to be buried in the grounds of Lansdown Tower, but his body was instead interred at Bath Abbey Cemetery in Lyncombe Vale on 11 May 1844 (accessible from Ralph Allen Drive).  The Tower was sold to a local publican who turned it into a beer garden. Eventually it was re-purchased by Beckford's younger daughter, Susan Hamilton, Duchess of Hamilton, who gave the land around it to Walcot parish for consecration as a cemetery in 1848.  This enabled William Beckford's remains to be taken from Bath Abbey Cemetery and reinterred near the Tower that he loved.
  His self-designed tomb—a massive sarcophagus of polished pink granite with bronze armorial plaques—now stands on a hillock in the cemetery surrounded by an oval ditch. On one side of his tomb is a quotation from Vathek: "Enjoying humbly the most precious gift of heaven to man—Hope"; and on another these lines from his poem, A Prayer: "Eternal Power! Grant me, through obvious clouds one transient gleam of thy bright essence in my dying hour."
  Henry Goodridge designed a Byzantine entrance gateway to the cemetery, flanked by the bronze railings which had surrounded Beckford's original tomb in Bath Abbey Cemetery.
  The Walcot Cemetery is no longer used for burials, but is open for public access.  The Tower is open to the public on regular but limited days in the year (see the website of the Bath Preservation Trust for details).
caption: Beckford's tomb with the tower in the background
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